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Research on the European Union over the years has significantly advanced our understanding of the domestic impact of EU policies. However, notable blind spots persist regarding the broader impact of EU legislation on national policy portfolios and its interaction with domestic policy-making. To address this gap, we introduce a novel analytical concept that adopts a macro-perspective to scrutinise the impact of EU policy-making on national policy portfolios and their trajectories over time. We analyse EU-induced change dynamics through three dimensions of national policy portfolios: policy efforts, policy innovation, and policy design quality. Applying our framework to clean air policy across 13 EU countries over 38 years, we find ambiguous effects on national policy-making. Our findings reveal that while the EU’s role in clean air policy has expanded, it simultaneously has constrained innovative potentials within national portfolios and challenged design quality, substituting rather than complementing national policy efforts. We contribute to the state of the art by providing a novel conceptual framework on the macro dynamics of multi-level policy-making, offering theoretical arguments on the expected effects of EU influence, and presenting empirical evidence of these dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Union (EU) is widely assumed to be a global environmental leader, especially in addressing climate change, though this reputation suffered greatly when European leaders were sidelined during the 2009 United Nations Climate Summit in Copenhagen. Subsequently, however, the EU has made significant progress in extending its Emission Trading System to the aviation sector, one of the fastest-growing sources of greenhouse gas emissions, and did so not only regionally, but also managed to get it onto the global policy agenda. This contribution investigates the EU's role in shaping the 2013 International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) resolution committing 191 government signatories to developing a global market-based measure to cap international aviation's carbon pollution. While not exactly setting new environmental standards or achieving definitive regulatory success, the case illustrates the agenda-setting capacity of the EU through leveraging its market power and adopting an explicitly extra-territorial rule to induce potential regulatory co-operation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Union's (EU's) regulations affect how business is conducted and consumers and the environment protected in parts of the world far beyond its borders. Moreover, the external impact of its regulations informs understandings of the EU as a global actor. This contribution makes three main arguments. First, the EU's regulatory influence varies systematically across different forms of regulatory interaction: regulatory competition and different forms of regulatory co-operation. The form of regulatory interaction, therefore, is a critical intervening variable between the EU's regulatory power resources and its influence. Second, within the different forms of regulatory co-operation the EU's influence varies in line with expectations derived from the literature. But, third, the magnitude of the EU's influence seems to be considerably less in regulatory co-operation than suggested by the literature on regulatory competition; a finding that reinforces the first argument. The contribution also introduces the rest of the special issue, identifying three overarching conclusions: the utility of the EU's regulatory power resources is context specific; debates about what kind of power the EU is, at least as previously conceived, are unproductive; and that the EU's engagement in the world is better explained through general theories of international political economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Union (EU) is usually described as a promoter of global environmental governance, committed to sustainability and the precautionary principle. Regarding international fisheries management, however, the EU has repeatedly deviated from these principles. This article analyses the EU's policy in two Regional Fisheries Management Organizations (RFMOs): the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization (NAFO) and the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT). The EU's deviation from its environmental principles is explained by the weakness of the pro-environmental advocacy coalition in the EU's fisheries policy subsystem and the overcapacity of the EU's fleet, which first arose when European fishing nations were excluded from traditional fishing grounds during the creation of Exclusive Economic Zones in the 1970s. At the same time the article finds evidence of a trend towards sustainability and precaution in the EU's external fisheries policy since the mid-2000s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution explores the European Union's (EU) efforts to 'globalize' EU environmental regulation. EU leadership on global environmental governance emerged as a result of the combined effects of domestic politics and international regulatory competition. The growing power of environmental interests in Europe from the late 1980s, coupled with dynamics of EU policy-making, led the EU to commit to ambitious environmental policies. Given this commitment, it was in the EU's international competitive interests to support international agreements that would pressure other jurisdictions to adopt similar environmental regulations. Promoting treaties that spread EU environmental norms internationally also served to legitimize EU rules and to shield them from legal challenges before world trade bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ‘wider Europe’ initiative opens the possibility for a far-reaching association of the EU's eastern and southern European neighbours which, by offering ‘everything but institutions’ (Prodi), proposes an alternative to membership. This article presents this initiative as part of an ambitious external governance agenda by the enlarged Union with the aim to manage its new interdependence in an altered geopolitical context. Focusing on the conception of interdependence and the institutional configuration of EU relations with its near abroad, external governance is defined and examined in three prominent 'soft security' issues: justice and home affairs, environmental and energy policy. It is argued that external governance seeks to expand the 'legal boundary of the Union with only limited openings of its ‘institutional boundary’, thereby oscillating between an inclusionary and exclusionary approach towards its near abroad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Union (EU) has issued hundreds if not thousands of directives and decisions over the last twenty-five years. Yet questions of compliance - to what extent do states comply, which states are likely to comply, what patterns of compliance exist within and across areas of regulation? - have not been extensively investigated and remain poorly understood. This article argues that compliance is a matter of state choice, and reviews current theoretical writings in international relations and comparative politics in order to better identify reasons for states' choices to comply with EU directives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the drive to create a single market in the European Union (EU) was ostensibly about market liberalization, it has led to a recasting of the role of different tiers of government in the EU. This article introduces the special issue on regulation in the EU by summarizing some of the main features of the new regulatory environment. The article then assesses factors shaping the evolution of rules and points to topics in need of further work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the EU Presidency plays a more important role than is generally assumed. It is not so much that the incumbent Presidency may try to 'push through' legislation close to the national interests but that it has an important role in fostering the Europeanization of national environmental policy-making. Holding the Presidency creates strong pressures to achieve agreement and fosters a subtle but important learning process about the European and national dimensions of policy problems. This is one of the main reasons why national objectives and 'styles' tend more often to give way to 'European thinking' about environmental policy when the Presidency is held. National differences in running the Presidency become more apparent during informal Councils which do not make decisions directly resulting in legislation. It will be shown that there appears to be little difference overall in the way the British and German governments run their respective Presidencies despite considerable differences in their national 'styles' of environmental policy- making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on the research "Decision-Making in the European Union." It mentions that the research aims to explore and compare the important features of decision making in various policy sectors. It mentions the policy sectors that will be analyzed in the research, which includes environmental policy, foreign and security policy, and internal market. It mentions that the initial stages of policy making is neglected in the literature of the European Union. It mentions that the study explores the stages and networks through which policies are developed. It mentions that the research is interview-based. Also mentioned are several commissions that have offered grants for the research.